Atlas, The Next Generation robotics (video)

originally posted by: Vdogg
a reply to: ChaoticOrder

This is light years beyond the initial iteration. Look up some of their earlier videos. The original Atlas was large, noisy, top heavy, clunky, and required tethers to stay upright. The original was a model T, this thing is a corvette.

Weren't some of those "tethers" electrical cords for powering it? Is this newer unit using a gas engine or battery? I'm not sure because it's possible it's a gas engine because they've cancelled the noise somehow?

I'll tell you--after watching it again--I'm disturbed if this thing is somehow adapting or doing things on its own. Most of the time when I watch these videos, I'm wondering how much of it's preprogrammed. As another poster wrote, its default walking movement is repetitive and it only exhibits more natural movement when something bad happens.

a reply to: jonnywhite

Battery powered, no idea how long the battery last. Pair this with the Tesla snake charger and this thing could operate autonomously indefinitely.

a reply to: jonnywhite it's a combination of algorithms and machine learning. It's impossible to program every type of terrain the robot will encounter. All you can do is program guidelines and allow it to learn through experience, which is what they're doing.

originally posted by: kloejen
There is still a long way for the "Terminator".. still looks creepy thou

Put a weapon on it and imagine a small army of them and it's scary enough. Although an armed human small army isn't much better.

originally posted by: Discotech
Robots are going to bring about a collapse in society, why ? They'll get programmed to do the jobs that lower class perform, working tills, stocking shelves, serving food, you know the jobs that the majority of people do. So what's going to happen when all these jobs vanish overnight to the robots ? How are the lower class going to earn money when there's no jobs for them to make money ? If we don't as a society move away from money then there's going to be a massive problem when technology removes a large percentage of jobs.

And it's all much much closer than most people realize because driverless vehicles are already here.

I'm not exaggerating at all. 'Truck driver' is the most common job in most US states and many countries around the world. Just the trucking industry by itself going driverless would create a huge crisis. Beyond just trucking, add in taxi drivers and delivery drivers and bus drivers and pretty much any other sort of basic driving job.

Driving jobs are currently so numerous that replacing basic driving jobs with driverless vehicles will then destroy many other jobs by subtracting driver wages from the cash flow of the economy.

It would be, in effect, a devastating economic tsunami of missing demand, taking out everything in its path, starting with what's left of retail and then destroying all sorts of corporate jobs. Even government spending would be in crisis because even their cash flow i.e. tax collection in all its various forms would be heavily effected.

And it's all ready to go now, whenever 'tptb' want to pull the trigger.

originally posted by: Vdogg
a reply to: ChaoticOrder

This is light years beyond the initial iteration. Look up some of their earlier videos. The original Atlas was large, noisy, top heavy, clunky, and required tethers to stay upright. The original was a model T, this thing is a corvette.

I didn't just discover the internet, I'm familiar with their earlier models.

originally posted by: Vdogg
a reply to: ChaoticOrder

This is light years beyond the initial iteration. Look up some of their earlier videos. The original Atlas was large, noisy, top heavy, clunky, and required tethers to stay upright. The original was a model T, this thing is a corvette.

Great point!

I don't know why people are expecting to see C-3PO at this stage. This is early in the process and like you said, it's the difference between a Model T and a Corvette. All you have to do is extrapolate this technology out 20-40 years from now and it's plain to se where this is going when you add in the rapid advancement in areas like deep learning and machine intelligence.

You have intelligent algorithms that do things like like learn to play video games with little to no input on how to play the video game.

Google-backed startup DeepMind Technologies has built an artificial intelligence agent that can learn to successfully play 49 classic Atari games by itself, with minimal input.

"It's the first time that anyone has built a single general learning system that can learn directly from experience," he told journalists ahead of the announcement.

In the Nature paper published today (25 February), however, Hassabis and his coauthors reveal how deep Q-network (DQN) combined a very human type of learning known as reinforcement learning, with deep learning -- the method Google employed back in 2012 to teach its AI to recognise images of cats in YouTube videos. Hassabis noted this is the first time an open system has combined the two approaches.

DQN was only given pixel and score information, but was otherwise left to its own devices to create strategies and play 49 Atari games. This is compared to much-publicised AI systems such as IBM's Watson or Deep Blue, which rely on pre-programmed information to hone their skills.

"The interesting and cool thing about AI tech is that it can actually teach you, as the creator, something new. I can't think of many other technologies that can do that."

www.wired.co.uk...

Here's a couple of videos of DQN playing video games. You can see it learning.





So, it's not hard to imagine these robots equipped with something like DQN and other learning algorithms in the future which will make them smarter and smarter as the years go by.

It will not just be robots though. DQN could enhance human learning. One day humans can learn to operate like a skilled surgeon in a very short period of time or learn how to play basketball like Lebron James like you saw in the Matrix where they learned how to fly a Helicopter in a matter of seconds.

originally posted by: kloejen
a reply to: Discotech

I think you nailed it right there! Totally agree!

The robots are never gonna take over in a "wise" manner as hollywood tries to portray. The mean thing here is cheap labor. Back to slavery, and this time no one can argue if the bots got a soul, right or not, because they have not!

You think that wont one day become a argument? Already the debate is do we even have a "soul"...what makes these robots any less alive than you or me, do they not move, think, react to stimulus, etc..
I can hear the arguments already.

And we also have the many videos showing robots in a simulated emotional state that the humans (both on and offscreen) eventually accept as alive and with a soul.


I have very little doubt that in say, 200 years, if we could freeze ourselves now and wake up then, we will find synthetic humans being equal to biological humans, (and the many other levels inbetween the two).

I would find future discussions interesting about the points..such as people demanding the right to marry a synthetic, the inevitable allowance, then history showing us a bunch of crazy backwards apes thinking biological life is the only possible life with self realization.